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Today’s data breaches are planned and executed with military precision. This Security Brief reveals how cybercriminals can get in and out of your network without being detected. It also gives you tips for helping secure your data, documents, and devices.

Malware that encrypts a victim’s data until the
extortionist’s demands are met is one of the
most common forms of cybercrime. And the
prevalence of ransomware attacks continues
to increase. Cybercriminals are now using
more than 50 different forms of ransomware
to target and extort money from unsuspecting
individuals and businesses.
Ransomware attacks are pervasive. More than
4,000 ransomware attacks happen every day,
and the volume of attacks is increasing at a
rate of 300 percent annually.1 According to an
IDT911 study, 84 percent of small and midsize
businesses will not meet or report ransomware
demands.2
No one is safe from ransomware, as it attacks
enterprises and SMBs, government agencies,
and individuals indiscriminately. While
ransomware demands more than doubled in
2016 to $679 from $294 in 2015, the cost of
remediating the damage and lost productivity
is many multiples higher.3 Ransomware is the
equivalent of catastrophic data loss, except

Stay ahead of the evolving threats.
Organized crime is driving the rapid growth and sophisticated evolution of advanced threats that put entire website ecosystems at risk, and no organization is safe.
The stealthy nature of these threats gives cybercriminals the time to go deeper into website environments, very often with severe consequences.
The longer the time before detection and resolution, the more damage is inflicted. The risk and size of fines, lawsuits, reparation costs, damaged reputation, loss of operations, loss of sales, and loss of customers pile up higher and higher.
The complexity of website security management and lack of visibility across website ecosystems is further impacted by the fact that it is nearly impossible to know how and where to allocate resources.
Website security must be evolved in line with these growing threats and challenges.

Enterprises like yours face the growing risk
of cyberattacks, which increases your exposure
to the risk of data loss. One of the most menacing
forms of these is ransomware, where your data
is encrypted and literally held ransom—until you
pay cybercriminals to release it, or you recover
your data from a point in time before your
systems were attacked.
Such attacks and data losses make headlines
—damaging your organization’s reputation.
And with new regulations concerning data
protection coming into force (such as those
introduced by the US Department of the Treasury
and the European Union) failing to prepare
for a quick recovery from a cyberattack could
mean serious financial penalties.

Cybercriminals are evolving. Increasingly, they are capitalizing on the open and unprotected nature of the Domain Name System (DNS) to launch damaging phishing, malware, and ransomware attacks. How are you proactively protecting your network and users from these targeted threats? Here are five things to ask yourself as you consider a DNS security solution for your company.

Companies are pursuing digital transformation. The goal is to improve customer value, operate with greater efficiency and agility, and increase innovation. But as companies leverage new workflows, security has not kept pace, and cyber criminals are becoming more sophisticated. This white paper describes a security paradigm for today’s hostile environment: zero trust.

Cybercriminals are evolving. Increasingly, they are capitalizing on the open and unprotected nature of the Domain Name System (DNS) to launch damaging phishing, malware, and ransomware attacks. How are you proactively protecting your network and users from these targeted threats? Here are five things to ask yourself as you consider a DNS security solution for your company.

Companies are pursuing digital transformation. The goal is to improve customer value, operate with greater efficiency and agility, and increase innovation. But as companies leverage new workflows, security has not kept pace, and cyber criminals are becoming more sophisticated. This white paper describes a security paradigm for today’s hostile environment: zero trust.

Cybercriminals are evolving. Increasingly, they are capitalizing on the open and unprotected nature of the Domain Name System (DNS) to launch damaging phishing, malware, and ransomware attacks. How are you proactively protecting your network and users from these targeted threats? Here are five things to ask yourself as you consider a DNS security solution for your company.

It was recently found that most Global 2000 organisations have failed to completely remediate Heartbleed. This leaves these organisations vulnerable to cyberattacks, future brand damage, and intellectual property loss.

This paper reveals how not securing all of your keys and certificates enables cybercriminals to bypass controls like threat detection, data protection, firewalls, VPNs, DLP, privileged access, and authentication systems that you expect will mitigate threats.

There’s a war being waged on all our networks, and security researchers around the world are on the front lines. Here’s the inside story of how our elite security-research team neutralized one of the biggest threats in years.

Lax SSH security and management can lead to significant gaps in security controls. Cybercriminals target these gaps to gain full access to sensitive, regulated, and valuable systems and data.
Read the solution brief, Stop Unauthorized Privileged Access, to close these SSH security gaps and protect your business:
• Learn about the top SSH vulnerabilities
• Discover how to reduce risk of SSH key misuse
• Develop a strategy to manage and secure SSH keys

Security is everyone’s job today, from consumers, to system administrators, to executives. If you are doing business, you need to elevate the priority of security across your organization and data center. Over the years, cybercriminals have gotten more advanced and better funded. They are entire teams of highly trained hackers, and they have built it into a very profitable business. Cybercrime is big business. In many cases, states have built their own cyberattack teams. These teams are no less important to their state strategies than their army or navy. And just like these cyber-attack teams are prepared to attack anyone, you too must be prepared to defend against anyone. Whether you know it or not, you are in a cyber war. You need to be prepared.

Advanced persistent threats (APTs) are stealthier and more spiteful than ever. Sophisticated techniques are used to quietly breach organizations and deploy customized malware, which potentially remains undetected for months. Such attacks are caused by cybercriminals who target individual users with highly evasive tools. Legacy security approaches are bypassed to steal sensitive data from credit card details to intellectual property or government secrets. Traditional cybersecurity solutions, such as email spam filters, anti-virus software or firewalls are ineffective against advanced persistent threats. APTs can bypass such solutions and gain hold within a network to make organizations vulnerable to data breaches.

With companies embracing mobility to maintain competitive advantage in the digital era, information security threats have increased exponentially. Userfriendly technologies such as mobile devices, mobile apps, and cloud storage are often hacker-friendly too, creating opportunities for cybercriminals to covertly infiltrate company data. This opens the door to data loss, reputational damage, loss of proprietary information – not to mention the associated regulatory penalties and potential legal fees. IT bears the brunt of responsibility for information security, yet according to Forrester, internal incidents top the list of security breach causes in 2014.

Banks and credit unions can prevent fraudsters and other cybercriminals from gaining an upper hand on them by using more sophisticated protection. This protection is found in five layers of proactive security defense. Q2’s paper, Multilayer Security— Because a moat is not enough, discusses these essential layers to keeping account holders secure.

Human targeted attacks continued to lead the pack in 2016. Attackers’ used automation and personalisation to increase the volume and click-through rates of their campaigns. Taking a page from the B2B e-marketer’s playbook, cyber criminals are adopting marketing best practices and sending their campaigns on Tuesdays and Thursdays when click-through rates are higher. Meanwhile, BEC and credential phishing attacks targeted the human factor directly--no technical exploits needed. Instead, they used social engineering to persuade victims into sending money, sensitive information and account credentials.
Timing is everything—attackers know that hitting your employees with a well-crafted email at the just the right time produces the best results. Of course, this varies by region. So if you are responsible for worldwide SecOps, you need visibility into not only attack patterns but also when and which employees tend to click.

For any sized organization, securing data and networks today is a daunting task. New vulnerabilities are discovered almost daily; new malware strains are developed as soon as a detection script is written for the old ones; and cybercriminals can buy prepackaged exploit kits on the Darknet backed by professional support teams. As a security analyst, you need more than a few point solutions designed to defend the network’s edge. You need visibility, perspective and an innate sense of when things just don’t seem right.

According to Gartner, by 2017, more than ?50% of network attacks will use encrypted SSL/TLS. Most organizations cannot decrypt and inspect SSL communications to detect these threats, which creates security blind spots.

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DatacenterDynamics is a brand of DCD Group, a global B2B media and publishing company that develops products to help senior professionals in the world's most ICT dependent organizations make risk-based infrastructure and capacity decisions.

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